Naomi Klein on the Great Clash Between Capitalism and the Climate
September 16, 2014 |
Naomi Klein's new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate is coming out just as the UN is meeting on climate change, and a massive rally to protest the lack of progress on global warming is shaping up in Manhattan on Sunday. Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine, one of the most influential books of the past 50 years. She sees her new book as the natural successor to The Shock Doctrine as she deepens her critique and insists we need to fundamentally rethink our approach to climate. The inconvenient truth about global warming is that it isn't really about carbon, but rather capitalism. Our economic model is waging war on the earth, and unless capitalism is dramatically changed, we are doomed. Yet Klein is no pessimist. She sees the seeds of a broad cross-sectional mass movement emerging that will lead to a transformation of our failed economic system to something radically better. Sunday's People's Climate March in New York is a key step toward a future we must create in order to survive and thrive.
AlterNet editors Don Hazen and Jan Frel spoke with Klein via phone in Canada, where she lives, on Friday, Sept. 12, prior to her traveling to New York and participating in a wide range of protest events, debates and discussions. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
AlterNet: Let's start with the big climate march on Sunday and your support of and involvement in it. Do you have a reaction to Chris Hedges' critique of the march which seems to be consistent with your critique of the big enviro groups in your book? Basically he says the demands are amorphous, anybody can join, it doesn't have much meaning.
Naomi Klein: Knowing the amount of work, energy and coalition-building and care that has gone into the organizing, the march—which you know obviously it's not perfect—but I think it was grossly mischaracterized as being simply some big green thing. When It's actually been incredibly grassroots.
Do I think a march is going to do anything? No. The point is this march is different in that it's a manifestation of real rooted movements that are fighting fracking in their backyard, and refineries that are giving their kids asthma, and students who are demanding divestment of fossil fuels at their universities, and faith groups who are doing the same in their churches and synagogues. And what the march will be is a moment where people feel the size of this movement, and it will give people the strength to go home and continue at these moments of convergence too. Every once in a while it's nice to see how big you are. Especially since so many of these movements are local. It can feel small and isolated. There haven't been many moments of convergence like this for the climate movement, so I think it's great.
And I don't see the point of throwing stones. The decision was made to have an open call so that any group could endorse the march as long as they abided by certain organizing principles. And so the groups that are drawing attention, some of which I've gone after in the book, are not the groups who organized it. They're just groups that endorsed because, for whatever reason, they thought it would be useful for them. Which I think speaks to more of the strength of this movement, and that everyone wants to be a part of it. But I just think to dismiss all of this incredible organizing in this kind of guilt-by-association way; frankly I'm a little offended by.
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